Installation to totally wiped drive

Hello all, I am new to the forum and to Zorin so please bear with me. I have a Dell XPS M140 laptop that the Hard drive failed on last week and I was unable to clone the drive before it died. I purchased a good used Fujitsu MHV2060AH 60Gb IDE hard drive and used AOMEI partition assistant to do a 7 pass wipe on it. I want to install Zorin 9 as the new O/S but I have never done anything like this before. I am just your average, everyday, middle aged computer user who happens to know some about hardware but not software or programming. Is there anything that I have to do to the hard drive before I attempt to install the new O/S? Thanks

Hi, I would prepare your partitions from running the live disk (but you will need to use and format them for the same purpose at point of install if you are dealing with a 'blank drive' but should work if you boot from USB or DVD first.
Have you burned the .iso to a DVD or have you tried creating a bootable USB?

Hi,

boot the Zorin live Cd and use Gparted to create your partitions. Zorin Menu > System Tools > Administration > Gparted:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2601

Once you have created your partitions, use the "Something Else" install method if you wish:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4848&p=22956#p22956

Just a follow up, I downloaded the Zorin 9 lite and burned it to a DVD disk. I then installed it on the laptop and everything runs great. I used the lite version because I wasn't sure if my laptop would handle the core version. My laptop was built in 2006 and was running XP. I'm not sure what the processor and chipset is but I upgraded the RAM to 2 gig just before the HDD died. Can anyone give me any guidance on whether my computer could run the core version or even Zorin 10? thanks.

All I can advise is that you download a core version of 9 which is free and give it a go - your main issue MIGHT be the Intel graphics - the people that provided the intel Graphics for LInux aren't good when it comes to supporting Long Term Distributions so their policy is not very 'Green'!

I installed Zorin OS 9 Core on a 32 Bit Gateway that was built in 2007. If memory serves me correctly it had a Celeron Processor and 2GB of memory but can't remember what it had for graphics. About the only complaint was that the machine ran a little warm but the owner downloaded TLP onto the machine and it was of fair help.

I also put the 64 Bit version on one of my grandkids laptop that was built in 2009 which was mine. Can't remember what the processor was but it had 4GB of memory and runs great.

As stated, grab the free ISO and give it a try and see what happens. The Lite version works very well on a netbook I gave away that originally had Windows Starter, an Atom processor and 2GB of memory. I tried Core on it but just too much for the processor.

Good Luck!
Tim